KENTUCKY
KY Forward
A friend of mine recently responded to a local newspaper cartoon with a letter to the editor and a cancellation of his subscription. The cartoon depicted a woman being harassed by a bishop about her use of contraception but the bishop then making a forward comment about her little boy. While this cartoon is utterly tasteless, the truly shocking element of all of this were the reader comments submitted on the newspaper’s website. The sheer ignorance of most individuals regarding the priest abuse scandal is astounding. Our mainstream media outlets would lead you to believe that a majority of priests were abusers and the numbers of victims in the millions. Without minimizing the seriousness of the abuse that did indeed occur, it’s important to take a look at the facts and let them speak for themselves.
Here’s how to start. There is an important document known as the John Jay report that outlines the specifics of the crisis with documented statistics. This report was commissioned by the Catholic Church and independently conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York to take a critical look into the matter of accusations against priests to try to get a better understanding of why this crisis occurred in the first place. To my knowledge, this was an unprecedented move on behalf of the American Catholic church. I have known of no other institution upon discovering a weakness of this nature that has freely chosen an investigation into their own operation, but this is exactly what the Catholic Church did.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.